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Friday, April 10, 2009

Reppert Working at Cross Purposes With Himself

Repert:While one can bring up problems for Calvinism that are connected to the question of assurance, I am not at all persuaded that these issues are really separate from the theodicy-related difficulties that many of us have with that theology. I mean if you swallow the idea that God might be justified in reprobating people for his own glory before the foundation of the world, I'm not sure it's any worse for God to also give some of them the idea that they have truly received the saving grace of God and then find out later that that was only appearance. If you swallow the camel, a little gnat sauce won't be a problem.

Reppert:One of the arguments in the inerrancy debate is the assertion that God cannot lie. I want to suggest that although this claim is initially intuitive, (I mean who wants a liar for a God?), there is what seems to me a forceful argument against the claim.

Here, in one fell swoop, Reppert knocks out of the ballpark (I hope he at least appreciates my use of a baseball analogy :-) his claim that it would be immoral for God to lie to people about the state of their assurance as well as his claim that moral intuitions trump arguments to the contrary with such force that you don't need to answer the argument to the contrary, no matter how good, because all you need say is, "I just don't have that intuitions, indeed, I have strong intuitions to the contrary."

So, if you have a liar God, then what's wrong with a reprobater? Put differently, if you swallow the camel, a little gnat sauce won't be a problem.

(Another post might be that Repert just pulled the rug out from all his proof texts for Arminianism. God might have lied. His belief that the God of the Bible is actually good--he might have lied about himself. His belief that Jesus came to die for everyone, he could have lied about that too. But we won't go there this time).

3 comments:

I was trying to pose a problem for the claim that God cannot lie, indicating that there was an argument against it. I was asking whether there was some way to believe in divine moral perfection, believe that lying is sometimes morally justified for benevolent purposes, and at the same time hold that God cannot lie. The kinds of lies that I have in mind have fairly transparent beneficent purposes behind them, and the overall effect is of course has to be for the eternal benefit of human beings. The title of Kant's reply to Constant is "On the Supposed right to Lie for Beneficent Purposes." So far I haven't seen any attempt to resolve the paradox.

It may turn out that the claim that God cannot lie can be defended. But I wish people would at least take a shot at the argument I provided.

To contrast this with the Calvinism case, you have reprobations which don't seem to have a beneficent purpose. With most of the problem of evil, if I use the range of responses available to someone who believes in libertarian free will, I can get a picture of why God permits various types of evils. There's a dim outline there, even though I can't come anywhere near to seeing how the details work out in particular cases. There's plenty of noseeum, but there is a good deal that I think I can see, which makes my position acceptable overall, given the positive reasons I have for believing in God.

With reprobations, I'm just blind as a bat. Explanations like "God chooses a world with damned people in it so that the blessed will realize that they are blessed by grace alone" just don't wash at all. So this looks like a serious disadvantage.

This disadvantage could be overcome by 1) strong reasons for belief in God, 2) a strong case for biblical inerrancy and 3) a strong case for a Calvinistic reading of the scriptural evidence, involving not only a) a defense of a Calvinistic reading of the "positive" Calvinist texts, and b) an good explanation for passages which are ordinarily taken to show a universal intent to save.

With reprobations, I'm just blind as a bat. Explanations like "God chooses a world with damned people in it so that the blessed will realize that they are blessed by grace alone" just don't wash at all. So this looks like a serious disadvantage.

Funny, that explanation is similar to what Paul says:

"What if God, willing to show his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering vessels of wrath fitted unto destruction: and that he might make known the riches of his glory upon vessels of mercy, which he afore prepared unto glory, even us, whom he also called, not from the Jews only, but also from the Gentiles?"